Who is Isaac Diller?
This photograph of Isaac Diller planting acorns in a still-barren Lincoln Memorial Garden was taken on Nov. 14th, 1936. That was the day the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts planted acorns donated from 28 states in the Springfield Garden designed to honor Abraham Lincoln.
Our “history committee” discovered the photograph, along with a short Springfield newspaper item about it, in the materials they’ve been archiving. That got them wondering: Why, among all the photographs of young scouts, would there be this one picture of a grownup planting acorns?
As it turns out, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum also has a photograph of Isaac Diller. It has among its artifacts an 1860 photograph of a young Diller standing in front of the Lincoln Home in Springfield, as well as an invitation to Diller to attend a birthday party for his playmate, William (Willie) Wallace Lincoln.
If the boy and the man are one and the same, that would make Isaac Diller a living link to Lincoln and the Lincoln family, as a friend of the Lincolns' son, Willie. And it would make sense that organizers invited him to plant acorns in the newly created Lincoln Memorial Garden.
